This page contains a list of quotes that I have been collecting over the years because they've caught my attention. There are even a couple of my own witticisms here.
My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I
had been one.
--Groucho Marx
Best thing you can teach your children
Next to never drawing breath
Is choking on it.
--Archibald Macleish
The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the
man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and
it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
--Marquis D. A. F. de Sade
Fear... can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If
you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear
makes you always, always hold something back.
--Philip K. Dick
We have nothing to fear and nothing to celebrate.
--Professor James Johnson
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
--Edward Dahlberg
As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
--Socrates
Nothing can come out of the artist that is not in the man.
--H. L. Mencken
There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
--Marie Antoinette
Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
--Arthur Balfour
A book's a book although there's nothing in't.
--Lord Byron
One truly understands only what one can create.
--Giambattista Vico
Never regret anything you have done with a sincere affection;
nothing is lost that is born of the heart.
--Basil Rathbone
Try to understand everything, but believe nothing.
--Unknown
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and
nothingness.
--Beckett
The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
--Baba Ram Dass
Beware of anything that wraps itself in a flag.
--Dana Blankenhorn
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he
loves the flag.
--Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard
Il y a une superficielle joliesse de la femme que le goût
provincial considère à tort comme la beauté.
Et puis, il y a la vraie beauté érotique de la
femme. ...en effet, le charme érotique se manifeste
plutôt par l'originalité que par la
régularité; plutôt par l'expressivité
que par la mesure; plutôt par l'anormalité que par la
banale joliesse.
--Milan Kundera
Ceci du moins est sûr : tout être de qualité
exceptionnelle est toujours un anormal, tant par son quotient
d'intelligence que par son quotient de sensibilité.
--Jeannine Etiemble
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
--Raoul Duke
Welcome to the Nineties: Welcome to Jail
--Hunter S. Thompson
You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or
they don't.
--Dagwood Bumstead
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
--Milan Kundera
Enjoy every sandwich.
--Warren Zevon
I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.
--Cicero
Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.
--Poor Richard
Come and die; it will be great fun.
--Rupert Brooke
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
--Milan Kundera
Self-sacrifice is for the desperate and the dumb.
--Steve Gilliard
What was tomorrow is today and will be yesterday.
--Jason J.A. Stephenson
"Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice.
--Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a
Lewis Carroll)
Everyone is from somewhere, even if you've never been there.
--Ian Anderson
Intellectual growth is contingent upon mastering the social
means of thought, that is, language.
--Lev Vygotsky
Kites rise highest against the wind -- not with it.
--Winston Churchill
Only dead fish swim with the current.
--Unknown
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
--Albert Einstein
You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
--Liz Smith
He could fit more words inside the smallest idea as any man
I've ever seen.
--Abraham Lincoln
A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it.
--The United States Supreme Court
Mais, quelle est la rencontre qui ne se fonde pas sur l'erreur?
...le premier regard de chacun s'adresse à sa propre
imagination et à sa propre mémoire, plutôt
qu'à la réalité de l'autre.
--Alicia Dujovne-Ortiz
Reality is that which can be narrated only in the form of a
story.
--Karl Jaspers
Reality, in sum, is human; it is always that which we make
signify, never a mere given.
--Lionel Gossman on Roland Barthes
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't
go away.
--Philip K. Dick
Reality is for those who lack imagination.
--Jason J.A. Stephenson
There are no guarantees in life, the Tao, or programming.
--Bruce Eckel
Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
--Elbert Hubbard
There's no way to make life perfectly safe; you can't get out
of it alive.
--Mary Shafer (NASA Dryden Flight
Research Center)
Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the
balls to live in the real world.
--Mary Shafer (NASA Dryden Flight
Research Center)
Software is but the metaphor our age offers for a struggle
found throughout the human epochs, that of the spirit to be freed
from the tyranny of the immediate and the necessary.
--Andy Oram
Writing software is more fun than working.
--Unknown
I'm not a computer programmer, but I play one at work.
--Found on
Slashdot
I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real
value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane
art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human
view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the
process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading
through his code, even in hexadecimal.
--Ed Nather
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other
invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
--Mitch Ratcliffe
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more
unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is
unreliable.
--Gilb
Anyone who says that the solution is to educate the users
hasn't ever met an actual user.
--Bruce Schneier
Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted?
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student?
Does a good father allow a single child to starve?
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code?
--Geoffrey James
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
--John Lennon
There are absolute things in the world but you must look deeply
for them. The things that first present themselves to your notice
are for the most part relative.
--Albert Einstein
We say that error is appearance. This is false. On the
contrary, appearance is always true if we confine ourselves to
it. Appearance is being.
--Jean-Paul Sartre
To think contrary to one's era is heroism. But to speak against
it is madness.
--Eugene
Ionesco
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
--Bertrand Russell
One must put a high price on his conjectures to burn a man alive.
--Michel de Montaigne
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as
false, and by the rulers as useful.
--Seneca
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able
and willing? Whence then is evil?
--Epicurus
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever
believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
--Richard Dawkins
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer
god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other
possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
--Stephen F. Roberts
In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are
consequences.
--R.G. Ingersoll
Morality is the herd instinct of the individual.
--Friedrich Nietzche
The feeble is devoured by his own.
--T.S. Eliot
Man is a useless passion condemned to exercise a worthless freedom.
--Jean-Paul Sartre
Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the
wheel on which he turns.
--T.S. Eliot
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes
are so small.
--Henry Kissinger
History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless
trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and
proper names.
--Leo Tolstoy
Nations are cold monsters.
--Charles de Gaulle
L'amour, tel qu'il existe dans la société, n'est
que l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux
épidermes.
--Chamfort
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of
the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
--Goethe
Women, deceived by men, want to marry them; it is a kind of
revenge as good as any other.
--Philippe De Remi
<screevo> I'm stranded at the gas station of love, and I
have to use the self service pump...
--Found on bash.org, an IRC quotes page.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
--Carl Gustav Jung
The universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly
big place, a fact, which, for the sake of a quiet life, most
people tend to ignore. Most would happily move to somewhere
rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most
beings, in fact, do.
--Douglas Adams
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a
crime to examine the laws of heat.
--Christopher Morley
I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
--Wilson Mizner
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence.
--W. K. Clifford
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot
change their minds cannot change anything.
--G. B. Shaw
Our appreciation is least in our own backyard.
--Joel Brown
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the
intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.
--Khalil Gibran
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
--Norman Douglas.
Plutôt crever de faim que de ne pas devenir écrivain.
--Henry Miller
Ecrire c'est un travail d'organisation autant que
d'inspiration, ce à quoi vous n'avez pas assez
réfléchi.
--exemple dans un livre de grammaire
All of us learn to write in second grade. Most of us go on to
greater things.
--Bobby Knight
La vraie vie est absente.
--Arthur Rimbaud
Cogito ergo sum.
--René Descartes
Je chie, donc je suis.
--Jason J.A. Stephenson
Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
--David Hume
Thank Heaven for little girls.
--Maurice Chevalier
And some of the other sizes, too.
--Sam and Dave
Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands
looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might
seem.
--Alan McKay
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.
--Benjamin D'Israeli
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
--Anita Brookner
The old forget. The young don't know.
--Japanese proverb
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old
have reminiscences of what never happened.
--Saki
My youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust.
--William Congreve
Young fellows will be young fellows.
--Isaac Bickerstaff
Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and
communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad
ghosts.
--Henry Miller
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
--Walt Whitman